The impact of priming different aspects of religion on aggressive behavior

• Main Author: Johnson, Christopher L.
• Language: EN
• Published: California State University, Long Beach 2017
• Subjects: Religion|Behavioral psychology|Spirituality
• Online Access: http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10253949

<p> Research investigating the impact of religion and religiosity on aggression and prosocial behavior is mixed. The reason for these inconsistent results may be due to the multifaceted nature of religion. This study was the first to investigate both the impact of different aspects of religion (e.g., spirituality, institutional religion, good and evil supernatural agents, etc.) as well as views of God as punitive on subsequent aggressive behavior. Results indicated that more punitive perceptions of God were correlated with lower levels of aggression. Furthermore, there was a marginal interaction between religious orientation and type of religious priming. Although simple effects and subsequent post-hoc tests did not reach standard levels of statistical significance, the direction of the effect for Christian participants was that priming with evil supernatural agents reduced aggressive behavior but this trend was in the opposite direction for non-Christians.</p>